e Alex.; the second affectionate and
familiar, like Sandy.

Still, even after making due allowance for such humbugs as these, a vast
residuum remains of people who, if born sixty years ago, could never by
any possibility have been made to see there was anything admirable in
Lippi, Botticelli, Giotto; but who, having been born thirty years ago,
see it without an effort. Hundreds who read these lines must themselves
remember the unmistakable thrill of genuine pleasure with which they
first gazed upon the Fra Angelicos at San Marco, the Memlings at Bruges,
the Giottos in the Madonna dell' Arena at Padua. To many of us, those
are real epochs in our inner life. To the men of fifty years ago, the
bare avowal itself would have seemed little short of affected silliness.

Is the change all due to the teaching of the teachers and the preaching
of the preachers? I think not entirely. For, after all, the teachers and
the preachers are but a little ahead of the age they live in. They see
things earlier; they help to lead us up to them; but they do not wholly
produce the revolutions they inaugurate. Humanity as a whole develops
consistently along certain pre-established and predestined lines. Sooner
or later, a certain point must inevitably be reached; but some of us
reach it sooner, and most of us later. That's all the difference. Every
great change is mainly due to the fact that we have all already attained
a certain point in development. A step in advance becomes inevitable
after that, and one after another we are sure to take it. In one word,
what it needed a man of genius to see dimly thirty years ago, it needs a
singular fool not to see clearly nowadays.

XIV.

_THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE._

Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we may
therefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turn
don't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel--or a
marriage.

Why is this? "Young people nowadays want to begin where their fathers
left off." "Men are made so comfortable at present in their clubs."
"College-bred girls have no taste for housekeeping." "Rents are so high
and manners so luxurious." Good heavens, what silly trash, what puerile
nonsense! Are we all little boys and girls, I ask you, that we are to
put one another off with such transparent humbug? Here we have to deal
with a primitive instinct--the profoundest and deepest-seated instinct
of humanity, save only th